I know it’s totally not wiki to say this . . .

I’m amazed by how delighted I find myself at finding my own work ‘out there’ on the Web, even without a byline, and open to the hands and eyes of anonymous editors across the world. I owe a debt of gratitude to the editors at Kairos, where I intern as a graduate student, who asked me to put my language sleuthing skills to good use.

The article was published in the spring of 2011, and as of May 1, my original text stands. Of course, I can’t make any claims that it will continue to stand, especially as wikipedia has invited edits to ‘improve’ and ‘wikify’ the text. Seeing those automated critiques is a little like getting my disappointing GRE writing scores: a moment of dark resentment, followed by a shrug and a return to the massive amounts of quality written work I churn out on a daily basis.

Just goes to show you that text, even and perhaps especially webtext, is subject to a variety of contexts and pretexts; it will be differently textured for different audiences and circumstances. But its structure and its history — the way the writing system works and how it got that way — remain consistent from one readership to another.

As text, the Web, and webtext alike weave together different strands of the world of ideas, it is the orthography itself, the way the text structures meaning and makes sense, that stitches together the consistent threads of meaning in a vast network of diverse situations and diverse readers.

Since we regard wikianything as rat-infested until definitively proved otherwise, it is now more than a couple of years or so since we last allowed the jigsawpuzzled defective globe icon of Wikipedia to sully any of our screens.

But… the mention of an article written by you sent us pronto to the site to see this wonder that we knew awaited: the only piece of scholarship with éclat written in superlative English to be found on this site of otherwise monumental linguistic anaesthesia.

Your article is in the worthy tradition of everything that the archetypal Encyclopédie of the French enlightenment set as a standard: rigour, style, verve, and a model of clarity and scholarship. It was the celebration of human language that the encyclopédistes aspired to in what Diderot regarded as the Republic of Letters.

Everything that Wikipedia isn’t.

No wonder the automatic engine of wikidumbingdown sniffily suggests “too much repetition or redundant language”. Poppycock! There isn’t a redundant syllable or a repetitive notion in the entire jewel of an article.

That the article’s text of texts has so far proved impervious to wikificatory dumbing down is probably a welcome sign that the monstrous regiment of wikifiers hasn’t the first idea of what your article is about. Not surprising; it’s an inspiring flash of scarlet in the pervading wikikhaki.

The etymology of ‘wiki’ is apparently the Hawaiian for “quick-quick”. The Kwikipedia for Quick-Fix Pedagoguery is now back behind our anti-banality firewall.